The Song and the Silence: A Story about Family, Race, and What Was Revealed in a Small Town in the Mississippi Delta While Searching for Booker Wright

“Have to keep that smile,” said Booker Wright in the 1966 NBC documentary Mississippi: A Self-Portrait. At the time, Wright was a waiter in a whites-only restaurant and a local business owner who would become an unwitting icon of the civil rights movement. For he did the unthinkable: before a national audience, he described what life was truly like for the black people of Greenwood, Mississippi.

Shortly after these remarks aired on television, life for Booker took a turn for the worst.

And so...